[Kamen Rider Die]

SSSS.DYNAZENON EPISODE 1 - “WHAT’S A KAIJU USER?”



I thought this was okay? Not great, but okay?

A lot of the tools that made Gridman’s premiere work are naturally going to be unavailable to the producers for a direct followup series, because using them again would make for a relentlessly disappointing echo of a seminal series; like, we gotta have a new amnesia kid get stuck in a parallel dimension while we all act like we don’t know where this is going? That’d be annoying, and dull.

What we get instead – robbed of the mystifying immersion and magical realism of Gridman’s instantly engaging debut – is something smaller in scale, and more uncomfortable for its refusal to let you in, which naturally suits a cast headlined by a very different kind of cool teenage girl: Yume.

(I will allow that Yomogi is our nominal lead for this diverse ensemble of negligibly intersecting protagonists, since he’s A Boy and that’s just how a lot of this genre of action storytelling works, but Yume’s the way more interesting character to me.)

Yume’s not like the cast of Gridman, that – excepting Rikka’s genre-lacadasical mother – exist outside a continuum of family and parents; sort of explicitly so, as it read to me as a show about pushing through the trauma of adolescence into the unknown of adulthood. Gridman barely allowed for things like the connection of history, because the show was about the isolation of Akane, so we didn’t really have to learn about anyone’s parents or home life. Gridman wasn’t that show.

Dynazenon very much is that show, and it’s most arresting and captivating when it allows for the scope of family to inform its cast. Yume’s parents are sniping at each other, the dishes aren't done, their interest in Yume is minimal and mildly disappointed. There’s been a death in the family, presumably – Yume’s sister’s room has been packed up, but enshrined. Yume continuously asks guys out, and stands them up, which on the surface is easy to interpret as teenage cruelty and acting out, but feels more like her trying to connect with her lost sister. (My headcanon right now is that the tower she goes to, and the one where she asks Yomogi to meet her, is where her sister died. I think Yume was supposed to meet her there, and she didn’t, and her sister died. Seeing someone else there makes her feel a bit like her sister’s still alive, and waiting for her, and she likes to watch that, while also punishing herself by disappointing another person who’s waiting for her.) The innate connection that Yume’s feeling her way through the absence of is so much weirder and sadder than a lot of the connections within Gridman’s cast, and it is refreshing in its personal-scale tragedy.

(Similarly, I really liked the scene with Yomogi having dinner with his mom and what’s probably her boyfriend? It’s just sort of awkward, and he doesn’t care about this guy, and he definitely doesn’t want his attempt at connection. I promise I will not always put Yomogi thoughts in parentheticals!)

All of that, the first half, I liked. I didn’t love it, because it’s paced too slowly and teenage depression is kind of not as engaging and Fog Kaiju and Alexis Kerib, but I respected its swing at doing exactly the stories that Gridman was not built to: parents, families, and history.

And then the giant robot showed up, and I sort of entirely checked out.

I don’t want to be that guy! I hate being the guy who doesn’t give a shit about the core action-adventure components of a toku show! But, man, the second Gauma’s doing his Big Hero Schtick, I just didn’t care. Nothing about the fight really worked for me, either aesthetically (it’s a bunch WHAAAA?!?! stuff from the other three, and it instantly made me miss the relative zen-like mindfulness of Gridman’s combat) or narratively (Dynazenon just sort of shows up, and it’s propulsive but lacked any sense of work or effort for what the heroes achieved). The fight just ended up being the thing that happened at the end of the episode, and it took me right out of an otherwise pleasant/depressing look at forging connections when the weight of the past is dragging you away from people.

So, yeah. I thought this one was okay.